Email Marketing Blog

Newsletter Sign Up

Marketing personas are a fantastic way to boost the ROI of your email campaigns.

We recently came across a campaign in which one of our favorite clients sent identical content to two different lists.

Why bother segmenting in your email marketing, you might ask, if the content is going to be the same? Good question. Turns out, this campaign was part of a long-term, methodical approach to improving email marketing ROI with marketing personas.

We say this all the time, but it bears repeating: The power of email marketing is in your ability to have a conversation with your subscribers. You don’t have to just push your message out to them. You can use the data you have about them to deliver a relevant message that they want to hear.

There’s another way to say this: Your subscribers are not all alike, and email marketing offers the tools to figure out what will motivate individuals within the larger group.

That’s why we were excited to see the results of this recent campaign.

Optimizing with Marketing Personas

A little background: In this case, we are talking about an online retailer that has created three customer personas, or segments, based on buying frequency. (We’re keeping things a little vague here because the client doesn’t want to reveal effective email marketing tactics to competitors).

The customer marketing personas are based on how often customers buy.

At the high end of the range is Group A, brand loyalists who buy all the time.

The middle tier, Group B, are frequent customers, but may need a push with a special offer to convert.

The third tier, Group C, includes occasional purchasers as well as subscribers who have never bought anything.

So for a recent product release, the client sent one campaign to each of the marketing personas. The brand enthusiasts were offered a collectible item featuring the brand’s logo. The other two groups were both offered free shipping.

So why, if Groups B and C were offered the same thing, would you still bother to keep the campaigns separate?

The answer can be found in the results of that campaign.

Collectible Item

Free Shipping

Group AOpen Rate: 53.4 %Click Thru Rate: 18.18 %

Group BOpen Rate: 52.6 %Click Thru Rate: 17.65 %

Group C Open Rate: 23.6%Click Thru Rate: 3.71 %

Group B, our occasional purchasers, responded favorably to the free shipping offer. Group C responded with a resounding "meh." There’s more work to do to find that right incentive or offer to motivate these casual subscribers. It may be that a 4 percent click through rate is as good as it gets, but the only way to find out is to try a different type of offer on the next campaign. Either way, there’s now a benchmark established for Group C with the free shipping offer.

And what about Group A? When you round those percentages, Group A and Group B had an identical response rate. Those strikingly similar results on totally different offers suggests that this retailer has perfectly dialed in what motivates its brand fans and its semi-regular customers with previous campaigns.

The important and vital lesson here is that understanding what motivates your customers requires seeing them not as one big group of people. Creating personas is a first step toward having an effective conversation with your subscribers. You’ll be able to run better tests and repeat your successes over time. Your subscribers will reward your work with more opens, clicks and even purchases.